Russian Service Culture

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Any visitor to Russia will have to get used to the fact that many things here are the same price (or more expensive) than in Western Europe, but will not be delivered with a smile or any sign that your custom is anything more than an effortful irritation to the waiter or receptionist that you deal with.

Take the hotel I stayed in outside Moscow. For 1500 rubles (about 30 pounds) I got a small, uncomfortable bed in a room (admittedly clean) which hadn’t been decorated since the 1960s. The curtains didn’t fully cover the window, I had to make the bed myself, mosquitoes abounded, there wasn’t a towel or soap. In the hotel there wasn’t a café or place to have breakfast, I didn’t even ask about Internet. To complete the insult, when leaving in the morning, I asked the staff to open the gates to the car park and they simply replied ‘do it yourself’ and handed me the key to the padlock!

The reasons for this absence of customer care are various. Many people point to the economic model of the Soviet Union: since there was no profit to be had from customers (everyone was simply on a salary), they were just an inconvenience, an interruption from doing the crossword. Even more, by serving a customer, the shopkeeper, hotel receptionist or waiter was actually doing them a favour and they ought to be thankful not to be turned away altogether. But in Western countries most waiters aren’t café-owners and they still manage to smile and care about their customers. I think it’s got something to do with centralization. In the USSR organizations were so large, distant and abstract that ordinary people didn’t relate to their employers at all. In surveys most people didn’t regard theft from the state as real theft.

There’s something historical about service culture in Russia, connected to the pre-Soviet division of professional and private spheres of activity. Although it’s changing under European and American influence, many people consider it invasive and impolite to be overtly friendly in a professional context. One day about a year ago I bumped into one of the teachers from the Academy where I study Russian on the street. ‘Hello, Tamara Dmitrievna, how are you?’ I said cheerfully in Russian. Later I received a telling-off from my Russian teacher for asking such an impertinent question.

Connected to this there’s the logic that smiling to strangers is a waste of energy or simply insincere. To some extent I agree that excessively Have-a-nice-day! behavior is annoying, but I do my little part to corrupt the absurd seriousness that I encounter here. What most Russians fail to realize is that if you behave in a certain way, then people will respond in kind. Since my Russian has been good enough I’ve started making flippant remarks to unfriendly waiters or confronting sulky shop staff. The other day I told one bad-tempered young man in a café to consider finding another job, to which he replied ‘With pleasure!’.

It is one of the ironies of the Soviet Union that 70 years of communism left Russian workers with the lowest levels of workplace legal protection and union support of any country in Europe. As a result, many people work 12 or even 24 hour shifts with few breaks for very low salaries in difficult working conditions. So I have sympathy for the unfriendly staff I meet.

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